Night Walks
A warm September evening and Mollie and I are up at Pine Street Woods. It is just past sunset with the air cooling. A faint hint of woodsmoke has returned after the cleansing rain of the other night’s thunderstorms. The hills to the west have a robin’s egg blue where they are silhouetted by a peach and salmon sky. Thin skeins of clouds sketch across the sky. We walk the easier paths of Mushroom, Pinecone, Momentum, then Meadow back to the truck.
I enjoy night walks or hikes but don’t do them often enough. The noises from town have quieted as everyone tucks into meals or the television. The still silence of the forest is broken by a shrill chorus of crickets. Some sing a continuous background. Others modulate their high pitch with a smooth pulsation. In some places they seem almost deafening against the silent stands of pine, fir, larch and cedar.
Night hikes have an added intensity from lacking most of the use of our pre-eminent sense. There are sections where the sky or moon might provide evidence of the trail but under tree cover there may only be the faintest outline of the path. Made easier tonight because we are intimately familiar with these trails.
Still there is this limitation and the heightened sense of hazard and this can move one to a greater sensitivity or edge towards the sublime.
I am reminded of a night hike I took nearly 20 years ago when I lived in Oregon. I set out down the Columbia River Gorge to the trailhead that takes you to the top of Larch Mountain. I had taken the shorter trail before where you drive a good distance towards the summit. From the Gorge it is a longer and steeper hike. (Almost 7 miles to the top and about 4000 ft elevation gain.)
I found the trailhead about an hour before sunset and walked rapidly up the trail. Other day hikers were streaming past me to the parking lot. I calculated I would not make the summit and return until well after dark. Here I made a decision that I had a headlamp and some water and these combined with keeping my wits meant I should be OK. The hike was lovely as long as the light lasted which was most of the way to the summit. I tried to memorize the hazardous sections where the trail narrowed along cliff sides.
Once I reached the summit I resolved to don my headlamp but leave it turned off until needed. I wanted to navigate by my limited sight.
The strenuous hike up and lack of food also put me into ketosis, like a kind of fast and the combination made the hike feel like a spiritual experience. At times I felt light and transported, at others guided. I felt intensely aware of my surroundings. In the short hazardous sections the headlamp came on.
By the time I returned to the parking lot I felt like I had had a singular experience.
My one moment of terror was near the end when I heard a noise high up in a tree, switched on my light to see three sets of eyes glowing back at me. They were raccoons staring down at me.
Tonight in Pine Street Woods was nothing like this heightened experience. We walked through open sections with the musical din of crickets. One pulsed and trilled right in my ear as I passed a young fir tree. I stopped and shone a light on it and I could immediately see the culprit. There was some magic in making the invisible real
The deep forests sections were as void of cricket sounds as they were of light and became these eery transitions from twilit open forest with a deafening background to deep darkest woods and almost utter silence.
As I write this the stars have begun to appear in the fir framed sky. A few flashes of distant thunderheads light the trees like weak flashbulbs. A quiet rhythm of crickets sings the night to life.
